Location, Location, Location, Oops

[vakkotaur]

LJ users have had the option for a while now of showing their location when they post. That's well enough, those who want to say where they are can do so and those who choose not to list that information simply don't list it and it doesn't show up. So far, so good.

But that's not all. LJ automatically turns the location into a link to Google Maps, which doesn't work out for a few reasons. For me, I normally have the scripting and plug-ins Google Maps uses disabled to avoid getting a screenful of winky blinky noxious spamvertizing that distracts from actual content. So the link doesn't work. While I don't care much for Yahoo, at least Yahoo Maps just works and isn't dependent to the point of addiction on scripting and plug-ins.

But that isn't everyone. Many do leave the cruft enabled (and how they endure it without getting seizures I don't know) but some locations just can't be trivially fed to a mapping service with much chance of a useful result. "At home" is a valid location - but feed that to a mapping service and whatever you get almost certainly won't be right. There are many other locations ("At John Doe's place.") which are like that.

The location entry would be a good idea, but the way it's been carried out it's only "a good idea, almost." It would be better if the link generation could be turned off and on by the poster, and if the mapping service linked to could be chosen by the reader.

Comments

Firefox to the rescue

[yakko.livejournal.com]

Actually, the "noscript" plugin for Firefox to the rescue. With noscript, I essentially have scripting and plugins turned off by default, and can either permanently or temporarily allow on a site-by-site basis. So I have Google, LJ, HSR, etc. permanently allowed, and I can temporarily allow shitty websites that pull their content in via some stupid javascript (and only if they appear to be the only source of the info I'm interested in). Un-allowing sites is just as easy.

Sanity kept, Google's AJAX-heavy stuff is useful and advertisers who dare run scripts on a third party webpage don't ever get access.

Anyway, I think LJ's "location" is pretty much flawed just because it assumes Google Maps will have a location for "I can't imagine hell being much worse" or any old nonsense input. Of course, once one knows that, they could just put "10020" or "29406" in there (assuming they're in the USA) and have it work.